Lots of bitterness and anger in England following the soccer team's ingnominious ejection from the Euro 2008 contest.
In the desperate search for excuses, the number of foreign players in the top league, the Premiership, is blamed.
The team over which my 9-year-old son expends far too much emotion, Arsenal, who are currently top of the league, regularly put out a team with no English players at all.
The theory runs that because English players get less chance to compete at the highest levels, their skills and standards can't rise far enough to make them internationally competitive when they come together as the national team.
So there are calls for some kind of cap on the number of non-English players in Premiership teams.
But surely the need is for higher standards, not lower? It's hard to see how kicking out better players would achieve that.
The problem is lack of training. The sport's governing body, the Football Association, has been dithering over spending $100m on a training academy where young talent would be nurtured. They still haven't made a to invest.
But a country of 60m people should have six or seven such academies, in my view, and some of the huge amount of money in the sport should be raised for that, either voluntarily or in the form of a levy on $300,000-a-week players and wealthy clubs.
Blaming foreigners for our problems may be a British trait with a long tradition.
But it's never done any good.
I'm an excited gadget watcher - I have spent far more money than I should buying new types of pocket computers and fancy mobile phones. I've spent more time than I should have setting them up and having long conversations with technical support agents in a wide range of countries when the latest black or silver box doesn't do what it says in the instruction book.
I've also bought books to download, which can sometimes fill in long train journeys. But I've never really been convinced you can get the 'feel' for a book if it comes in twenty line chunks on a small screen.
Now Amazon has developed it's own version of the , and it looks more likely to succeed than previous attempts. You can read it in sunlight because it uses electronic paper rather than a conventional screen. And it doesn't weigh much. The claim is that it will hold 200 books.
Its big selling point is that it picks up books wirelessly over mobile phone networks - you won't have to connect it to a computer, so hopefully those long conversations with the support technician won't be necessary.
I look forward to checking it out.
If the ebook really catches on and is fully developed it's potentially life-changing. Inevitably capacity will increase until some future generation of the device will be able to hold tens of thousands of books, and search them.
I like the randomness of going through my library picking up books and looking for ideas, just the way I used to like going through newspaper cuttings in a brown folder and getting tangential thoughts.
But I search the newspapers online now, so I guess I could live with searchable libraries too.
The amount of knowledge available would become near enough limitless.
And my books would become artefacts, more important to me for their covers than their contents - just like my 12-in LPs now, which I gaze at for the art but never listen to except as downloads.
The man who uploaded the first pirated copy of 'The Simpsons Movie' - a 23-yr-old Australian, Jose Duarte - was fined AUS$1000 in a local court this week.
Bearing in mind that the illegal copy was downloaded more than 3000 times in the two hours before it was removed by the copyright owners, that's not a very big fine.
Apparently, the court accepted his claim that he didn't know it was illegal to upload the copy he had videoed on his mobile phone. said he thought only downloading was wrong.
And his lawyer, Ken Stewart, gave a speech that must have been telling: "It would appear that this young man had the sophistication of a dead fish," Stewart said. "I have sat and spent time with this young man, ... and I am quite satisfied that he had no idea what he was doing."
The lawyer said his client had two goes at uploading and wasn't sure he had succeeded. The only response must be "Doh!"
Can you think of some possible uses of similar claims for mitigation?
"I had no idea the bank would go bust!?" Nick Leeson
"I didn't understand the documents - how did I know it would do any harm to sell them to Russia!?" Aldrich Ames
"We only wanted it because it was shiny - was it really worth all that?!"
etc. etc. I'm sure you can do better.
People really are buying more vinyl discs.
A friend of mine with a long and successful career promoting music sent me a link to a story in Wired which claims that it's not just mullet-headed musos who prefer vinyl records. They do actually sound better:
"Portability is no longer any reason to stick with CDs, and neither is audio quality. Although vinyl purists are ripe for parody, they're right about one thing: Records can sound better than CDs.
Although CDs have a wider dynamic range, mastering houses are often encouraged to compress the audio on CDs to make it as loud as possible: It's the so-called loudness war. Since the audio on vinyl can't be compressed to such extremes, records generally offer a more nuanced sound.
Another reason for vinyl's sonic superiority is that no matter how high a sampling rate is, it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove..."
We spoke to Chris Ashworth, owner of United Record Pressing, America's largest record pressing plant, based in Nashville, Tennessee. He told us "You can taste the beer in Alan Jackson's track 'Pop a Top' but you can't on the CD.
"The digital world will never get there," he said.
For me, whatever the sound quality, it's the art work that makes 12 inch LPs more creative.
You just can't get the same impact on a 4 inch square box.
| 14:08 UK time, Friday, 23 November 2007
